Business Units & Segment Performance
See side-by-side profit by location, division, or crew.
Business Units
Business Units are a per-tenant segmentation tag that QuickBooks Online calls "Locations." Use them whenever a single company tracks performance across multiple physical locations, divisions, stores, properties, territories, departments, specialties, regions, branches, or cost centers. When turned on, every income document (estimates, invoices, jobs) and every expense document (receipts, bills, marketing spend) gets a dropdown to tag it with a unit.
Set the label name (one choice per company): in Admin > Settings > Business Units, pick what to call the field, Off hides the dropdown everywhere, or pick from Locations, Divisions, Businesses, Properties, Stores, Territories, Departments, Specialties, Regions, Branches, Cost Centers. Changing the label name only changes the cosmetic text on the form fields; it does not move any data around.
Manage the value list (e.g. Downtown Store, Suburb Store): once a label is selected the inline manager appears below it. Add new units, rename existing ones, or click Hide to soft-delete. Hidden units stop appearing in new dropdowns but stay attached to historical records so old reports continue to display the right segment name. Restore brings a hidden unit back.
Where the dropdown appears:
- Job edit page (Jobs list)
- Estimate detail page
- Invoice detail page
- Receipt detail page
- Marketing Effectiveness expense entry
Auto-inheritance: set the unit on a job and every new estimate, invoice, and receipt attached to that job pre-fills with the same unit. You can override on any individual record at any time. Existing records are not retro-tagged when you set a unit on the parent job, only new records inherit.
Where the data shows up:
- Segment Performance dashboard, side-by-side comparison of all units
- CFO Dashboard, filter the entire dashboard to a single unit (or to "Untagged only")
- All Excel exports respect the active segment filter
Untagged records: any record left blank rolls up under "Untagged" on the Segment Performance page and on the CFO Dashboard's "Untagged only" filter. Use these views to find records that should have been tagged.
Segment Performance
Navigate to Company Insights > Segment Performance for a side-by-side comparison of every Business Unit in the company. Hidden when Business Units are turned off, turn them on in Settings first.
- Unit-by-Unit Table: One row per active unit (Location, Division, Store, etc.) plus an Untagged row and a rolled-up All units total. Each row shows committed revenue, earned revenue, job costs, margin $/%, active/completed/pipeline job counts, receipts YTD, and marketing spend.
- Period Selector: Switch between MTD, QTD, YTD, Last 12 Months, or All Time. The active period drives every column.
- Untagged Nudge: A blue banner appears at the top whenever you have untagged jobs in the current period, click through to assign them so the segment numbers stay accurate.
- Drill-In: Click any unit row to jump to the CFO Dashboard pre-filtered to that unit.
- Export to Excel: Downloads a workbook with two sheets, By Segment (the comparison table with totals row) and Job Detail (per-job detail with the unit name in column 1 so you can pivot in Excel).
